I have two chinese-born coworkers (who spent 20-30 years here in the us) in the same room. When we talk about china's expansion, I am always jealous of the public projects, infrastructure, housing, etc. They always point out the huge unemployment of young people, declining birth rate, and other social ills.

They say they're worried when the building stops. Even more people will be out of jobs. And when the nation ages all they built will be used and maintained by fewer people

I've never been to china so it's interesting perspective from people with family there and go back 2-3 times a year

I traveled to Wuhan twice a year for business for much of the last decade (until the pandemic).

China was a growing country that clearly knew how to build infrastructure. In Wuhan, they built an entire development intended to employ 100,000 engineers (Huawei + our US company's 50). They built a subway system in a decade that's bigger than New York City's. I took the high-speed rail to Beijing and it was superb. They replaced an old, shabby international airport terminal with a new one with the widest concourse I've ever seen. They subsidized regular flights between Wuhan and San Francisco on China Southern airlines. The Hyatt Regency there was one of my favorite hotels I've ever stayed in (cheap and high quality). In a big commerical district, they had the largest screen I've ever seen that had a Blue Screen of Death :-)

Dazzling yet I'm not bullish on China due to its demographics, among many other reasons.

Whenever the topic of Chinese infrastructure comes up I am reminded of a 2016 Wired documentary about Shenzhen. It was positive portrayal of hacker culture in Shenzhen. But one thing really stood out to me. They had demarcation line separating the city and “urban village”. It looked like lots of poor people lived in the urban village. The guide mentioned that the urban village will be torn down completely in 3 months to expand the city and people had to move. It sounded like gentrification. The host was impressed by the efficiency.

But it made me question how many countries can actually be that “efficiency” because matters of uprooting large swath of population will take years not months and run into significant legal challenges as well.

To be clear use of eminent domain and gentrification happens even in US but I doubt it can be as “efficient” as a technocratic government. It’s not a knock on Chinese government, just something I always wonder.

A Chinese person who was here in the US as a foreign student once commented to me that he was so surprised that the United States was like the country side. He didn’t realize how rural the country was.

This was at UCLA which is in LA which is the second biggest city in the US.

I'd say it's a country that builds a ton of infrastructure, at the expense of living standards of common people. The money from infra has to come from anywhere, and an all-powerful central government can just redirect the stream from consumer spending into building out infrastructure. Whether Chinese are happy about it, you'd have to ask them.

On the move to where? Massive unemployment amongst youth and population collapse is on its way.

You are projecting a fantasy.

And, more to the point, BYD exists because the CCP has been aggressively protectionist of its domestic companies and has been strongly involved in growing, supporting, and protecting its domestic industry to ensure it has one. BYD is not a cautionary tale about protectionism, it's a sales pitch for it.

I may end up living outside the US next year (was going to be this year but it’s been postponed) and when I was investigating auto options, I’ve been severely tempted by the BYD Seal as a replacement for my Prius. All the reviews I’ve found have been positive and while I’m not a big fan of the compromises made in the display mount for the useless automatic rotation feature, it’s quite tempting. I’m torn between just getting a new Prius or spending an additional 8K for the Seal. I don’t know that I’ll drive enough for the difference in cost to add up (or, for that matter, to justify buying a car at all, but that’s a question for a different day), but I really like the idea of not contributing to the pollution in the urban area I’d be living. Option C would be the plugin hybrid version of the Seal which would be cheaper than the Prius.

> the CCP can end BYD in a single weekend

Seeing the way tech companies behave makes me think they fear Trump the same way. for example, Tim Apple certainly crawls up Trumps arse.

The US has thousands of atrocities under its belt. For this aspect, the US and China tie in terms of the leaderboard.

The US can end any of its trillion dollar companies overnight. Ask anthropic how much they were looking forward to being on the receiving end of the orange gibbon's ire.

Running a business isn't a human right. Also, I hate the conflation people have that the ability for the CCP to do something means it would. Furthermore, the party in socialist states is basically just the government. It being called a party and being explicitly ideological in function isn't, in practice, very different from the US having something called the federal government that has a constitutional ideology

The world before all of the big beautiful tariffs.

It's depressing that we can't buy BYD in the USA. It's feeling more and more like being stuck with a Lada in the 1980s.

I believe they're specifically referring to energy policy. As they said:

> massive growth in Chinese renewables while the US opens up national parks for drilling and cancels solar/wind projects

The protectees in this case are fossil fuel interests.

The modern discourse is quite rough -- people have been making these equivalencies for quite some time -- but as the US behavior becomes worse and worse, these equivalencies become more and more true. And as they become truer, the people who have always been pushing them only feel vindicated.

It's quite unfortunate, but I can't say I blame them. From their perspective the tiger is finally showing its stripes.

There are two types of protectionism:

1. Protecting your interests by building a dynamic strategy. You protect your interests by enhancing your strengths and building on them.

2. Protecting your interests by playing “defense” against your decline.

We all know which country chose which path.

Chinese party leadership is stacked with literal engineers. They’ve prioritized development of industries crucial to their success. For example, they know they’re never going to be a big oil producer and that fighting wars over oil is expensive and futile, so they have developed their path to energy independence with their solar and wind industry along with electrified transit of all types.

Meanwhile, in America, our leadership is stacked with grifters who only have experience in shifting money around. We are all stuck with oil and car dependence that nobody’s willing to address with long-term infrastructure development reforms.

We are trapped fighting wars over oil because $6-7/gallon gasoline in middle America would trigger a major recession. Our government actively incentivizes wasting oil via automotive regulations written by industry lobbyists. That big F-150 parked at the Old Navy that doesn’t need to follow CAFE regulations is totally a “work truck.”

We don’t strive to build the most competitive industries, instead we use sanctions and tariffs to prevent foreign competition from reaching our shores.

And before you talk about China disallowing foreign competition, I’ll note that Chinese citizens can go to the mall in China and buy a Tesla, an iPhone, an Audi, Levi’s jeans, Coach bags, do a web search on Bing, deploy applications on AWS servers in Beijing, etc.

In the world of Chinese media I suppose? To me this all looks like the same hand-wringing angst we went through in the 1980’s with the industrialization of Japan bearing massive fruit.

Right down to the shaky real estate markets.

The US auto manufacturers could compete, they just don't want to.

They've played their own regulatory capture games here and have all but abandoned the concept of affordable small cars & EVs. They've decided to go all in on $80k luxury EVs and enormous trucks (while being protected by 25% tariffs on light truck imports), and the stupid CAFE footprint loophole.

Maybe if they'd stop flooding our streets with ridiculously sized vehicles and actually tried to compete, it would be a different story. They aren't even trying.

We are just as capable of offering subsidies, if thats what it takes, to make small affordable EVs.

It's what the USA did during its industrialisation, it's what Japan did during its industrialisation. If you are looking to history to find ways to make your country prosper and industrialise, wouldn't you take those examples since they panned out pretty well?

American car manufacturers have extremely small market shares outside N.A., and many (all?) of them required multiple government bailouts over the past few decades.

If you think that keeping China is good for the consumer, you'll have to present a stronger case than "we must protect our companies".

> The idea that we should allow cheap vehicles to flood the domestic market because that will "cause the US auto manufacturers compete" ignores the wholly uneven playing field at work here

We have been here before. This is Japan and the 1970s all over again.

The US car companies will absolutely refuse to deliver the affordable, high volume cars everybody wants until kicked in the ass and balls several times. In the 1970s it was land yachts; in the 2020s it's gigantic SUVs and brodozers.

I do not like what China and BYD represent. However, if they are the only way to dislodge the US car companies that are blocking progress, so be it.

Which country was this in?

> The good thing about China is that apart from Taiwan they have little territoral ambitions

One of the reasons China wants Taiwan is because it would enable further territorial expansions into The Philippines and Japan. China considers any neighboring Democratic nation a threat. Taiwan is just their first / easiest prospective target.

If you have access to PBS, there's a very good documentary that touches on this a bit called Invisible Nation.

That's not really like with like. If you divided the states in USA into countries, their sales would be "international". The designation is misleading.

No wonder, VAG has only produced overpriced cars for a while...

I recently helped a friend looking for a brand new SUV in the 70-80,000 euro range (taxes included) and the audi Q5 was both the most expensive and the worst built one in that price range.

We checked loads of cars and agreed that the volvo XC60 was arguably the best value for money, the BMW X3 was the one which drove the best (but also the most uncomfortable), the Lexus NX450h was the most comfortable and the best built, the Mercedes GLC was probably the most balanced one (although the value for money wasn't great).

The Audi Q5 only stood out for poor build quality and being overpriced. It's literally the only car which we didn't see an upside for, we didn't even bother to test-drive it... Also it seems they aren't very reliable anymore...

In the Netherlands I see plenty of Renault 5s or VW IDs, many Teslas, too. And almost no BYD

As a counterpoint, around 1/3 of EVs I see in France are Renaults. SImilar story, but a bit less evident, in Spain.

Both have decent amounts of Hyundai Ioniqs, Teslas, and some BYDs and Dacias. But especially in France, Renault Meganes, 5s and now the 4 is everywhere.

Don't forget that "Europe" is actually 30ish (if you count EU) or even more countries (if you count the continent), with wildly different markets and players on them.

Wait, wasn't the free market supposed to be a superior system? You cannot at the same time argue that something is better and wish you didn't have it

> We get degrees, we sit at desks, maybe even sit at home, work on computers, and generate an order of magnitude more wealth than our screw turning counterpart overseas

Generate wealth for whom, though?

That's also ignoring the entire economic underclass that system creates of service & gig workers that can no longer afford to live in the cities in which they work. Not everyone has the ability or desire for knowledge work.

The US still needs to catch up too. We have an infrastructure problem. Where is our high speed rail and public transit? Cycling infrastructure? Renewables? Housing in high demand areas? Socialized healthcare? Safety nets for said economic underclass?

We are behind in so many ways because we view wealth generation for the top xy% as the only metric of success.

> China is where the US was 75 years ago

Quite a wild claim

With EVs, Tesla's the only one in the US not phoning it in. I used to think they were until I got a new Model Y Juniper.

I don't count Rivian or Lucid until they actually have even somewhat affordable EVs.

But pretty much everyone else in the US is doing a piss poor job with EVs and just don't seem to care at all. Ford seemed to have lost interest in the F-150 lightning.

I agree that trade needs to be a two way street. But I'm not convinced yet on "affordable" since these might be severely subsidized by the Chinese Gov to undermine domestic car makers across different nations. I say might only because I'm not 100% sure.

I've had to rent cars a couple times the last year due to flight cancellations. Twice I got a corolla and was really impressed how nice they were, then I got an upgrade to a Cadillac. It had the lousiest transmission and the interior was covered in low quality feeling materials. Honestly at this point I would never buy American, sloppiest fit and finish I've seen.

The US is very strong in manufacturing. There is a lot lower percentage of the population working in the factories (thanks to automation), but there is just as much as there ever was if not more. It isn't high value/growth like data centers, but it is still there and strong

If 90% of the data centers in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb tomorrow, communication would be a shit show for a month or two, and then go on, as we'd fall back to simpler, less compute-expensive solutions. We'd also probably be net better off without all the adtech crap.

If 90% of the factories in the world were hit by a nuclear bomb, you'd find that your standard of living would immediately, and quite observably plummet.

You tell me which is more important.

The amount of internet technocrap we actually need to live comfortably is a tiny fraction of what actually gets built. Most of it is in service of adtech, the surveillance state, or shaving 0.5% off some rentseeker's fat margins (on his side, the savings aren't passed on to us).

No, US picked services, financials, defense, and energy

China picked manufacturing, infrastructure, consumable exports

All the compromises here were pointed out by critics on the left many decades ago. Letting capital flee to where labour was cheapest eviscerated the entire US and Canadian northeast/midwest manufacturing sector and was policy driven from the right.

That and we decided that only the private sector should be responsible for building infrastructure and housing, and then wondered why the cost of building either skyrocketed in cost...

And yet now it's the (far) right freaking out and trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

And yet we will do worse in both categories

US is not even capable of building data centers (or anything else anymore). This is why all the planned capacity is waaaaaay behind schedule year after year, as if Elon is running the entire operation :)

/insert star wars anakin and padme meme

Surely with the cost of fuel skyrocketing we'll pivot to public transit and non-fossil-fuel transport, right? Right?

I see claims like this all the time on HN. Where is this data supposed to be coming from? When I look it up on Google, I get data ultimately sourced from shady online IQ tests (which nonetheless purport to provide a monotonic ranking of every country in the world from China to Nauru, despite the fact that virtually none of these countries collect IQ scores from their populations).

I have no reason to doubt that China is modernizing and improving their gross aptitude for knowledge work! The directional point you're making may very well be valid! I'm just wondering how anyone could be quantifying it in terms of "average IQ", a metric that generally does not exist.

I write my congressman every few months about something. Sometimes just to send a form letter that one of the various organizations writes for me. I also vote regularly.

You should too.

How did it get here though? The west basically handed them everything on a plate and gutted the domestic industries for a quick profit. What next?

> China doesn't allow LGBTQ representation on public media.

And several US states are inching closer to making being some of those letters, particularly the T, outright illegal.

those mega projects are almost always killed by republicans. also, listen to the rhetoric around christianity in republican circles and tell me it isn't religious nationalism

that's what most innovation is. the model T wasn't the first car. it was the car that was sufficiently refined to take over.

I assume you're being sarcastic, but it actually is.

From my understanding China did have subsidies for EVs but that expired last year.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-...

Really? I think 38.9% of statistics without sources are made up.

Who cares? China is revving up energy production in renewables to out eat the fossil production, but all of these processes are energy hungry, and you have to pay the non renewable cost to create the renewables. But then you don’t need the fossil fuels anymore. My solar panels will produce for the next 30+ years and power my EV with very little effort or maintaining, whereas the fuel I used to drive my ICE car to the store yesterday is gone forever and will need millions of years of dead things to recreate.

This is literally using fossil fuels to create renewable energy, which is the ultimate sane and responsible way to use the energy from fossil fuels.

As an american i feel it. have you ever visited China? it's sad man, in more and more industries america is only able to compete by banning china from even contesting the market

Not just on dumping or price, actual product quality, innovation and value. It's impossible to visit a Huawei store in Beijing and not feel it in your bones

As much as coal is bad for the environment, eliminating it completely isn't a great idea. It's one of the few sources of energy capable of a black start https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2023/06/13/black-start/

Renewables generally aren't capable of a black start, wind turbines in particular use induction generators that require external power.

[dead]